A wireless local area network (WLAN) is established using a wireless router switch, which mostly provides local area network access to wirelessly connected client devices. Client devices may be client stations, such as notebook/laptop computers, smart phones, tablets, and other portable computer network devices. Wireless devices can include either wireless routers or client devices. Wireless network traffic includes a set of communication messages, known as frames, between any two devices.
Network monitoring is the process of collecting all frames that are flowing on wireless network channels. A channel is a range of radio frequency on which data can be communicated. A wireless network functions within a pre-assigned range of frequencies. Each wireless networking frame is defined within a standard, such as IEEE 802.11. Wireless networking is typically transmitted using a radio that includes a hardware transceiver to send and receive signals on one channel at a time. Received signals are interpreted as bits. A frame is a group of logically organized bits.
If a bit is lost in the communication channels, it may corrupt construction of a frame. Larger distances between a transmitter and receiver generally cause more signals to fade, get lost, or require being replicated. For this reason, a monitor can function within an acceptable geographic range from wireless networking transmitters due to having the transmission power of all wireless networking devices permitted within a small signal range. In addition to frame collection, wireless networks can be monitored by examining the activity of a networking device internally.
The routers log network traffic, utilizing its hardware for connectivity. However, this type of monitoring is limited to traffic through each examined device and not a general external monitoring. Another type of monitoring is network mapping. With network mapping, networks can be traced using simplistic path-tracing tools. Each of the above monitoring techniques brings different set of network information.
Network analysis is the process of examining the monitored data to find common patterns to identify network behavior. Due to the large amount of monitored network information, it is hard to focus on details. For this reason, network data and/or data values typically must be mined or summarized without losing data details.
What is needed is a system and method to monitor and analyze network traffic communicated over one or more networks with high efficiency. What is needed is a system and method to monitor and analyze network traffic within the analytic capacity of the system. What is needed is a system and method to efficiently monitor network traffic by substantially ignoring irrelevant and redundant data transmissions. What is needed is a system and method to at least partially determine the relevance of network traffic by analyzing metadata.